Perhaps it is time to expand the definition of bicycle advocacy. For a long time now--at least three
decades--advocacy has concentrated primarily on bike paths and lanes, bike parking, and facilitating
multi-modal commuting, where the bicycle is loaded onto a bus or train for part of the journey. There is
no question that all of these things are helpful and sometimes necessary, just as are the efforts to
encourage private employers to accommodate bicycle commuters, along with those that seek to open
people's minds to the very possibility of themselves commuting by bike. But there is a longer-term
project that, however quixotic it may now seem, will ultimately be necessary, and it is one that the activist
community should engage itself upon now, in however small a way: that is the proposal of new zoning
laws and planning practices to encourage decentralized development, which would site workplaces and
housing near enough to each other that most people would not need to commute longer than is
comfortable for them to do by bicycle, bus, or foot.

After all, that's how it used to be in cities all over the Old World, and it is the human-scale structure of
those cities, with their neighborhoods that have actual neighbors in them, where the cop lives around the
corner and the grocer sleeps next door, that give them the charm that Americans travel thousands of miles
at great expense to see; and it is the development of the urban/suburban dichotomy, with the majority of
work located in the city and the majority of workers scattered in surrounding housing tracts, that have
made of the cities, ghost towns, and of the suburbs themselves, emotional wastelands. If you must drive
forty miles to the office, drive ten miles to the restaurant or movie house, drive your children five miles to
school, and drive four miles to buy bread and spinach, you will never meet your neighbor on the corner for
a chat on the way home from your chores, you will probably never consider doing any of those chores on a
bike, and you will spend altogether too much of your life inside a small metal box. It is a sad fact, as most
of us know, that, since the forties, the American city has been structured around automobile use; no
matter
how many miles of bike lanes you stripe, you will not convince the suburban mother to pedal ten miles for
her groceries. Now that the nineties are drawing to a close, we must promote a new wave of urban
planning that re-establishes the neighborhood structure both in our cities and in the suburbs. This is a
project that can be initiated first in the suburbs, because it is there that employment centers do not yet
exist in the concentrations that they do in the city, and it is for the suburbs that planning practices can be
changed to prevent the concentration of office and retail space in too small an area, distant from housing.
In effect, one can create the new city as a series of small towns that abut each other, each having its Main
Street with its shops and offices surrounded by a few blocks of houses and small apartments, rather than
continuing the practices now prevalent of building vast, sterile industrial parks abutted by huge malls,
with most of the workers and customers living in more or less distant developments that are themselves
devoid of any services save gas stations and video stores.

In the cities themselves, the project would be both easier and more difficult: the cities have always had
housing and employment side by side, but the cities are also full of massive office and retail developments,
crowds of skyscrapers and hulking malls, which need far more workers and customers than the
surrounding neighborhoods can generally provide, and which will not be torn down readily no matter how
attractive an alternate form of development might be.

But the suburbs are just now beginning to draw employment centers in a big way, and now is the time
when the activist community can voice its support for planning practices that will make a human scale the
most important element of new or rebuilt neighborhoods. The Wal-Mart, the giant Safeway, the industrial
park--in short, the scale and bleakness of postwar development--are more of an impediment to bicycle
commuting than rainy nights or arrogant drivers; the fact that
the adult use of bicycles in a community has been noted as an indicator of that community's livability
shows us that this idea is at least an undercurrent in activist thinking. A civic structure that is built along
the lines of the small town will naturally accommodate bicycles; one built around the car never will, no
matter how many bike paths are put in. The bike paths will be used--on weekends, for pleasure riding.
But they will do nothing to improve the workday world. We must begin to model our cities on the
supercomputer, with its parallel processors, or on the Internet: many small towns working in concert will
be more efficient than one big sprawling one that cannot communicate well within itself. (Even in Los
Angeles, the capitol of car culture, you can see how well the Main Street model works in isolated but
effective neighborhoods such as Larchmont Village or parts of Santa Monica, where bicycles are ever-
present.)

A way to bring this about may be to demand that commercial development be limited in some sort of ratio
to housing: small offices, small shops, surrounded by neighborhoods: again, Main Street, but Main Street
every ten blocks. After all, the point of bicycle advocacy is not to ask favors for ourselves, who currently
ride bicycles for transport; it is to use bicycling to make our world more livable, for those who ride and for
those who don't. Encouraging the multiple Main Street model--and it is a model that some architects and
urban planners have begun promoting in the last three or four years--will automatically result in more
people riding bicycles, without bikepaths, without special laws or special treatment--just because a bicycle
will then be the obvious best way to get around.